First, I'd like to say that I know we're supposed to focus our response on "Love Poetry," and while I do appreciate EBB's and Naden's stances on love and their distinctly different approaches to it, I (being a fan of Walt Whitman) couldn't help but make connections between Naden and Whitman. Reading "A Pantheist's Song of Immortality" gave me a better understanding of what they do and against what they're reacting. So, I chose to write about some of their concurrences. I hope that's okay.
I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journeywork of the stars…~Walt Whitman, Song of Myself Great is life . . and real and mystical . . wherever and whoever,Great is death . . . . Sure as life holds all parts together, death holds all parts together;Sure as the stars return again after they merge in the light, death is great as life.~Walt Whitman, “Great Are the Myths"
I use the above quotes from Walt Whitman as springboards into Constance Naden’s “The Pantheist’s Song of Immortality.” Both Whitman and Naden lived and wrote during a long transitional phase of literary movements—from Romanticism/Transcendentalism to Realism. Setting aside the fact that generic distinctions tend to be quite reductive and abstract, we may look at this transition, partly, as an effect of rising scientific fields of knowledge that tended to approach Romantic Idealism with radical skepticism; the latter literary movement may be seen (again, partly) as a reciprocal response to emergent and developing fields of knowledge. In this poem, Naden, who is indubitably informed by the contemporary sciences, seems to be reacting against that vein of Romanticism that prioritized sentimentality and sensibility above the empirical and rational, which we encountered in Stael’s Corinne, or Italy, but she does so as a (if I may) post-Romantic, still maintaining a focus on sentiment but approaching themes of death and love with a heightened empirical, or scientific, perspective; hence, the topic of pantheism. Whereas Stael's character Corinne indulged her sentiments and imagination--without a supplementary empirically-based driving rationale--to the point where they consume her physically, Naden flips the Romantic vein and seems to prioritize reason, supplementing it with imagination.
Naden seems to quite explicitly acknowledge and oppose the Romantic perspectives on love, death, the sublime and their power to inspire imaginative creativity: “Her life was one fair dream of friend and lover; / And they were false – ah, well, she knows it not” (7-8). She does not seem to approach Romantic ideas with pure mockery and/or cynicism, though; she sensitively dovetails her oppositional stance by consoling this unnamed female with what seems to be vocabulary of scientific objectivity, showing her mastery and control of such language. She positions the “false” dream and desire to “keep [her] memory green [through a lover]” (22) as illusory, but curtails this stance with a pragmatic but consoling approach that positions the subject's life as far exceeding her expectations in terms of leaving a legacy: “See yon broad current…its motion / Has changed for evermore the river bed” (25, 27-8). Here, she explains that one’s life, as well as one’s death, contributes to the grand scheme and motion of the universe in ways similar to the content found within Whitman’s poetry.
I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journeywork of the stars…~Walt Whitman, Song of Myself
Great is life . . and real and mystical . . wherever and whoever,Great is death . . . . Sure as life holds all parts together, death holds all parts together;Sure as the stars return again after they merge in the light, death is great as life.~Walt Whitman, “Great Are the Myths"
I use the above quotes from Walt Whitman as springboards into Constance Naden’s “The Pantheist’s Song of Immortality.” Both Whitman and Naden lived and wrote during a long transitional phase of literary movements—from Romanticism/Transcendentalism to Realism. Setting aside the fact that generic distinctions tend to be quite reductive and abstract, we may look at this transition, partly, as an effect of rising scientific fields of knowledge that tended to approach Romantic Idealism with radical skepticism; the latter literary movement may be seen (again, partly) as a reciprocal response to emergent and developing fields of knowledge. In this poem, Naden, who is indubitably informed by the contemporary sciences, seems to be reacting against that vein of Romanticism that prioritized sentimentality and sensibility above the empirical and rational, which we encountered in Stael’s Corinne, or Italy, but she does so as a (if I may) post-Romantic, still maintaining a focus on sentiment but approaching themes of death and love with a heightened empirical, or scientific, perspective; hence, the topic of pantheism. Whereas Stael's character Corinne indulged her sentiments and imagination--without a supplementary empirically-based driving rationale--to the point where they consume her physically, Naden flips the Romantic vein and seems to prioritize reason, supplementing it with imagination.
Naden seems to quite explicitly acknowledge and oppose the Romantic perspectives on love, death, the sublime and their power to inspire imaginative creativity: “Her life was one fair dream of friend and lover; / And they were false – ah, well, she knows it not” (7-8). She does not seem to approach Romantic ideas with pure mockery and/or cynicism, though; she sensitively dovetails her oppositional stance by consoling this unnamed female with what seems to be vocabulary of scientific objectivity, showing her mastery and control of such language. She positions the “false” dream and desire to “keep [her] memory green [through a lover]” (22) as illusory, but curtails this stance with a pragmatic but consoling approach that positions the subject's life as far exceeding her expectations in terms of leaving a legacy: “See yon broad current…its motion / Has changed for evermore the river bed” (25, 27-8). Here, she explains that one’s life, as well as one’s death, contributes to the grand scheme and motion of the universe in ways similar to the content found within Whitman’s poetry.